forty-three:
thursday mid-day

Trudy stopped at Jerry’s house for a quick shower and one-hour power nap while Duncan took care of “keeping up appearances,” as he put it, and “keeping his job.” He had smiled broadly when he said it. “Doesn’t matter where you’ve been before, what you’ve done in this business. It’s all about today and tomorrow’s editions. It’s a treadmill and the treadmill never stops.”

Jerry was at work so when she stretched out on top of his bed, warm and lulled by the shower, she was asleep in mere moments.

Allison had taught her the self-alarm trick and it worked, even from the near-comatose depths of her nap.

She dressed with a strange but relentless thought in her head. She had been thinking about Ricardo Reyes and his broken taillight and his house in New Castle and imagining what the next steps might be, how this was going to play out, when she suddenly realized how much she had been thinking about Duncan Bloom and his cool, capable demeanor. She couldn’t help but contrast it with Jerry’s general attitude and she fought the urge to think about their relationship, which had reached a state of maintenance. Jerry was a stellar example of the old saying that ex-hippies make the most zealous capitalists. She wasn’t sure she shared his thirst for bottom-line business viability. Everything was viable this and viable that.

Yet she had always been fascinated by news. Before her brain surgery and back when the epileptic seizures kept her confined, the news networks had become her lifeline to the world. She was intrigued by reporters who buzzed from assignment to assignment and she was interested in how ideas and issues took hold—or didn’t. And here was a reporter and he was engaging and personable and unassuming. And he knew how the world worked. Or, at least, he knew how to ask the right questions and dig for information.

The thought was hard to shake. The drive to Down to Earth offices was out of obligation. She knew Jerry would read the contradictions on her face. Duncan Bloom understood the human struggle in Alfredo Loya’s predicament. To Jerry, Alfredo Loya was a business complication.

Jerry stood up from behind his desk and gave her one of his too-long, overly purposeful hugs, as if she might crack unless he held the pieces together. The hug said more about him and his needs.

“You look refreshed,” he said. “Smell great, too.”

“Showered at your place,” said Trudy.

“I can smell the shampoo,” he said. He circled back behind the desk. “It’s already a busy day around here, practically an invasion.”

The implication was clear. Get to work.

It would be unlike her to ask for time on the computer. She wanted to muck around on the websites Bloom had shown her, see what she could find out about Ricardo Reyes and the company he listed on a car loan application as the place where he worked. They had the company name, Pipeline Enterprises, but no solid information about location, service, products, or purpose.

“Anything new?” said Jerry. “I assume you haven’t been talking to the police.”

The space between them felt dead. Trudy sat in the chair for salesmen and visitors.

“No police,” said Trudy.

Jerry took a swig from a quart-size cup. She could smell Jerry’s custom roast. “You’re tense,” he said.

“Hard to feel settled or centered,” said Trudy. “People in your house, you know. Creepy. I don’t want to be here, in fact. I feel like we’re a target.”

She had a right to a healthy streak of paranoia, given the late-night intruders.

“They won’t come here in broad daylight,” said Jerry. “I hope. I think. If they were broad daylight types, they would have official roles, specific powers. Names, too.”

The words came tightly, with restraint. They had the air of instruction. He tapped twice on his keyboard with one hand, glanced briefly at the computer screen, picked up his coffee and leaned back.

“You still want me to go to the cops,” said Trudy.

Jerry paused like he was thinking, but Trudy knew better. “What I want is for you to be out mingling with our customers and showing them how to turn Roaring Fork clay into power-packed loam.”

Jerry took a drink from his coffee. He could work on the cup all day, didn’t mind it tepid.

“And, yes, a quick trip down to the police,” he added. “Would it hurt? Put it on the record? Forget about everything that led up to it, but someone broke into your house and they drove a long way to do it. Let the cops decide what they want to do with the report, but give them the option. What if they come back tonight, still looking?”

Trudy’s thoughts drifted to River Meadows Mobile Home Park and she imagined their home now bare to the walls, their lives blown apart.

“At some point Alfredo must have told them where he had been working,” said Trudy. “So when he ran from the van they knew where to come looking.”

Minor businesswoman celebrity good for sales, bad for every other reason. Her late-night visitors had probably figured out where Tomás or Alfredo had lived, asked around enough with their quasi-ID’s to find his home and then they put the screws to his girlfriend or one of the others who coughed up the fact that Alfredo had been squirreled away by his boss. “No cops. Not yet.”

Jerry folded his arms. Trudy could feel the admonishment before it was uttered.

“There’s more at risk here than you think,” he said. “The business is an extension of you and when the business doesn’t play by the rules, it will come out. If they both came to your house, this spot is next. Everyone in town knows I sold the grocery store to work with you. Any ten-year-old with an old phone book could find my home address and the I’m-Feeling-Lucky button on Google would fork it over in nanoseconds.”

He had rehearsed this pitch. Trudy felt every ounce of his logical fretting but what came through his look had more to do with his disappointment in her, like she was the feisty renegade who didn’t know her limits.

“All this is at risk,” he said. “Somehow or someway it will all get dragged out. Businesses are not immigration authorities. The humanitarian gestures, getting Alfredo back on his feet—it’s all well and good up to a point. But we’re not in a good position to sit here and wait for their next move. It would be a public relations disaster if this hits the news.”

Actually, thought Trudy, the newspaper in this case sees the bigger picture and knows that her business had been working in the murky waters of the immigration issue, like virtually every other firm out there that depended on physical labor.

“One more day,” said Trudy. She tried to hit a tone somewhere in the general neighborhood of non-inflammatory, but she was sure it came out argumentative. “Maybe two. And maybe you turn off the lights here for a day or two and spend time at the store or the herb stand, where there’s lots of people around.”

“And after one day or two?” he asked.

“I go down to the police, lay it all out.” Trudy had a hard time picturing it, but she said it. Her head was already thinking ahead to when she was back with Duncan Bloom and they were studying the dirt on the underside of every rock they could find.